Like many of our Jazz Super Fans, Tom Kohn's passion for music started when he was a teen, with a job in a record store and a penchant for acquiring albums that would impress even the most dedicated adult collectors. He grew up into a music business day job but, after suffering a life-changing event, he decided to make a go of his first love: selling records. At the same time, the Rochester, New York native found what we think is a pretty creative solution to the problem of spending time and money traveling to New York City to attend concerts; read on to find out what it was.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I was born and grew up in Rochester, New York, where I still live and own a record store, Bop Shop Records. I have a "regular irregular" schedule of live performances there. My first job was in a record store in high school and by the time I was 20 I had probably 2,000 albums (I had taken over my parent's basement) and was going to every concert I possibly could. After high school I worked for a guitar effects company, MXR, as a production tech doing in-house repairs and testing. I also worked for then-distributor Rounder Records doing sales in all the stores, where I learned so much about every genre. And then I lost my son and that changed my life. I decided to refocus my energies and start selling records.

I started out buying and selling used records in 1982 at a semi-permanent weekly flea market store (also called Bop Shop), which morphed into the physical record store by the mid-'80s. I've also been presenting jazz and other music there since around 1988. No artists were coming up to Rochester in those days and I was blowing $500 bucks to fly down to hear music in New York. So I thought why not invite people to come here and play and pay them the $500 instead.

Since then, the record business has been through many ups and downs. Rollercoaster is a mild way to put it. It's been through hell and back for a lot of different reasons but right now it's good. We're enjoying a really healthy resurgence of interest in vinyl. And there's a lot of great music out there at the moment—especially in jazz. In bad political climates the arts tend to flourish because people have more to say. Record stores are an important link between the people who create music and the people who listen to music, and it feels good to be a link in that chain.

What is your earliest memory of music?

We didn't listen to a lot of music at home. My parents had the Kingston Trio records and